LITMIR.BIZ

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Abigail stammered, going bright red, and clutching the seat of the chair to stop her hands from trembling.

      ‘The man who filled your head with rubbish like that?’

      ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ she said sharply. ‘And I don’t have to stay here a minute longer and listen to this!’

      ‘Was it your mother, then?’

      ‘What makes you say that?’ At this point, every nerve in her body was jangling. This was the first time, she realised with panic, that he had ever managed to get any conversation between them on to an intimate footing and hold it there.

      ‘She struck me,’ he murmured thoughtfully, in a deceptively mild voice, ‘as the sort of woman who doesn’t mind thrusting her opinions on to other people, including her own daughter. That can be a disaster when it happens to a child, or an adolescent.’

      He gave her a sidelong glance from under his lashes.

      ‘She can be a bit domineering, I suppose,’ Abigail admitted, only realising afterwards that she had fallen for a trap. He had given her a choice of talking either about a man or her mother, and she had chosen her mother when in fact, if she had been thinking straight, she would have seen that she was under no obligation to discuss either.

      ‘This is stupid,’ she said, fidgeting but not actually summoning up the courage to get up, ‘sitting here, wasting time talking about nothing, when there’s a pile of work back in the office waiting to get done.’

      ‘We’re not talking about nothing. Unless that’s how you would describe your life.’

      ‘And stop putting words into my mouth!’

      Their eyes clashed and she felt a strange, giddy sensation overwhelm her.

      ‘How long did your friends stay?’ he asked, veering off at another tangent. He sipped his coffee and regarded her over the rim of the cup. Compelling. That more or less described him. His looks, his mind, everything about him compelled. Why else would she be sitting here being persuaded, against her will, to talk about herself?

      ‘An hour or so after you left,’ she said.

      ‘Very nice girls,’ he murmured, and she had the sneaking suspicion that he was leading up to something, though what, she couldn’t quite figure out. ‘Have you known them a long time?’

      ‘Years. I grew up with Alice, in fact. I’m an only child and she was like a sister to me.’

      ‘Down-to-earth, sensible girl,’ he mused, leaning back in the chair, his long, lithe body dwarfing it.

      ‘Yes, well, we all are,’ Abigail said tartly. ‘Reality isn’t something you can escape from when you have to strive for every little foothold you gain in life.’

      ‘That sounds like philosophising to me.’

      ‘I guess it does,’ she answered with a reluctant grin. ‘I didn’t lead a deprived existence, I always knew that there would be food on the table, but that luxuries were out of the question. Now,’ she said briskly, ‘have I answered all your questions? Do you feel that you now know me? Can we return to work?’

      ‘There is all that paperwork on the takeovers to work through, isn’t there?’ he agreed, raising his eyebrows, as if only now giving that any thought at all.

      ‘Yes, there is!’ She didn’t want to sound eager, but on the other hand she had no desire to continue their fraught conversation. In fact, she would have happily taken on a charging bull with her notepad if it would have provided the necessary distraction from Ross’s intimate probing.

      ‘And you’re right, there’s a pile of paperwork waiting on my desk to be sifted. Usual stuff. Letters from clients, contracts that need signing, statements to look at. Routine things, but they do take up one’s time.’

      ‘Yes, they do!’ she agreed lustily.

      ‘But it can all wait, I think. At least until we have another cup of coffee.’ He held out his cup with barely concealed amusement and she threw him a furious look.

      Playing games. That was what it was all about, she thought, rapidly refilling his cup and handing it back to him. Games that had been initiated from curiosity. She hated games. She had always been a serious girl, with her feet firmly planted on the ground, and her head where it should be, not spinning somewhere in the clouds.

      The only man who had ever played games with her had been Ellis, with his smooth patter. Had his games been initiated through curiosity as well? Or boredom? Or maybe they had been the effect of their enforced late nights alone in an empty office? Whatever, they had taught her a bitter lesson, and she felt a sweeping resentment that Ross was toying with her as well.

      Martin was not a game-player. He took life seriously as well. She had a fleeting mental image of him. Pleasant-looking, with neatly combed brown hair and blue eyes. A thoroughly nice chap, as her friend Alice had whispered to her at some point during the engagement party.

      She wondered, in a flash of sudden insight, whether she hadn’t allowed herself to enter into a relationship with him because he was just so different from Ellis, because he was sincere at a time when sincerity was the one thing she desperately needed.

      She had met him at a dinner party, where they had automatically paired off, being both single, and it had just developed from there. No heady passion, no thunder and lightning, just a quiet, unfussy friendship between two people who shared similar interests. But would she have responded to him if that disastrous romance only months previously had not left such a sour taste in her mouth?

      The thought confused her.

      ‘The food was very good,’ he mused, holding her gaze until the unsteadiness that she had been feeling since they had entered the boardroom threatened to take over completely. ‘I never knew that you were such a good cook.’

      Abigail sighed in resignation. ‘You don’t give up, do you?’

      ‘Whatever do you mean?’

      They both knew what she meant. He had broken through the carefully controlled barrier that had always separated her private life from her working life by turning up at that engagement party, and he wasn’t about to desist until his perverse curiosity about her was satisfied.

      ‘I’m not a bad cook,’ she said. ‘Why are you suddenly so interested?’

      ‘What makes you think that I haven’t been interested in you from the start?’

      It was a curious way to answer her question and for a minute it threw her into speechless silence. Her mind flew back over the past eighteen months, and snippets of conversation between them resurfaced from the depths of her subconscious, like little eels wriggling free from the rocks under which they had been firmly buried.

      She remembered times when he had asked her about herself, about what she did in the evenings, what movies she liked, whether she ever went to the theatre. And she could remember her responses with equal clarity. The uninformative, abrupt answers, the firm closing of any door between them that he might have been trying to open.

      The rational side of her knew that it was stupid to let what had happened between her and Ellis affect the way she looked at the rest of the male sex, she knew that the constant erosive effects of her mother were a legacy she should leave behind. But she couldn’t help herself. Ross Anderson, she had known from the very start, was precisely the sort of man she should steer clear of, and she had made sure that she listened to her head and obeyed its instructions.

      He continued to stare at her in that unsettling way of his, until she said nervously, with a little laugh, ‘Of course I did far too much food! There was an awful lot left over. I shall be eating cold chicken and beef in various guises until doomsday.’

      ‘Sounds a dismal prospect,’ he murmured softly, tracing the rim of the cup with one long finger.

      ‘Do you do a lot of cooking?’ she

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